The best way for any company to thrive is to establish a strong workplace that embraces an effective culture. An effective culture in the workplace is built upon the idea that employees feel empowered, respected, and excited to be working.
A lack of knowledge is found within the leadership of many organizations when it comes to the implementation of an effective culture that promotes psychological safety, innovation, and creativity. Often managers and executives aren’t open to or aware of how to give their employees a voice. Instead, they lead through fear and intimidation which leads to a toxic and/or unproductive work environment.
Toxic or unproductive worksites often lead to employee resentment, resulting in underperformance and stagnation. When this happens, the workers begin to feel burdened by their job and will only commit to doing the bare minimum of required tasks aka “quiet quitting”. Research has shown that people want to step up and be leaders, they want their ideas to be heard, and they want to contribute to the overall success of the business. However, toxic and unproductive worksites make this impossible.
Dara Barlin, Founder and CEO of the Center for Transforming Culture, is helping businesses to create effective cultures through Human-Centered Leadership strategies and toolkits. Barlin has decades of experience working towards bringing about positive change in many different industries and through government policy. In 2012 she led a peace building project that brought together 97 countries with the focus of making the world a better place. The project achieved this through improving communications across cultures in ways that developed a connected vision around the world.
The initiative succeeded at bringing together Palestinians and Israelis as well as Christians and Atheists. They also brought together Wall Street bankers and Occupy Wall Street protesters to talk with one another and come to a peaceful common ground. All this was done by building an infrastructure for how people can communicate effectively, allowing them to leave behind differences and focus on creating powerful change together.
Barlin worked for a think tank in London and then went on to work for a major philanthropic foundation that focused on education reform efforts. Barlin’s work was a key contributor to the Obama Administration, providing bipartisan strategies for improving schools that gained support from educational stakeholders across the country. Barlin later co-authored her first book titled New Teacher Mentoring: Hopes and Promise for Improving Teacher Effectiveness. More recently she has released a second book titled A New Kind of Power: Using Human-Centered Leadership to Drive Innovation, Equity and Belonging in Government Institutions.
One of the biggest issues Barlin addresses in her work is lack of psychological safety in the workplace. Psychological safety is a term used to describe an environment where employees feel safe to speak their minds, allowing them to admit to mistakes and try to correct them. Barlin says when people are able to speak their minds it improves the success of the business.
“When people feel free to take risks they will try new things and it allows them to express what works and what does not work to their boss and other employees,” says Barlin. “There’s rapid sharing of information and problem solving that introduces innovative practices that can be incorporated into the culture of the company. When psychological safety is not there employees lie, hoard information, and engage in other problematic behaviors that kill culture and team outcomes.”
Barlin has found that a lot of toxic environments come from excessively strong top-down hierarchies at the leadership level. These heavy-handed approaches often stem from a fear of bad media and not being able to control the workplace. For employers, this causes the workforce to become reluctant to do the work and means there is not enough capacity to get the work done. For employees, this causes a lack of creativity and animosity amongst each other. To combat the lack of psychological safety Barlin teaches leaders and employees to move away from traditional styles of leadership and embrace Human-Centered Leadership.
To fully adopt Human-Centered leadership, Barlin offers consulting as well as robust tools from the Center for Transforming Culture. One of the most popular tools is that of the Kaleidoscope method; a collective-impact protocol that brings employees and leaders together to improve team outcomes and culture through a hands-on strategic planning process. There are also a series of courses they offer where leaders can take themselves or engage with their employees to support positive change.
The psychologically safe workplace course is designed for managers of teams in government agencies. Participants of the program learn how to use Human-Centered Leadership to create an excellent team culture to improve employee productivity and promote a feeling of empowerment among the workforce.
Another program in the toolkit is the Planning for Equity and Efficiency course which gives people in leadership roles the ability to improve employee’s sense of inclusiveness, belonging, and operational efficiency. The final course which is aimed at fostering a culture of feedback and learning creates a work environment that embraces feedback, supports continuous learning, and improves the company as a whole.
Barlin says she has been working with executives to develop new ways of creating leadership methods that embrace psychological safety and a positive place to work in.
“A lot of people don’t know what it looks like to create an empowering culture, but most people want to create a great place to work,” says Barlin. “They want to be amazing leaders and inspire their employees to reach their full potential, so that their team and the organization can thrive. I've found when I work with these leaders the strategies I offer really resonate. This allows them to embrace a new style of leadership that fosters a thriving culture and at the same time improves productivity, innovation, mental health, and employee initiative.”
Media Contact:
Name: Dara Barlin
Email: [email protected]
